While the retail expansion rolls on downtown, the players are changing.

Instead of edgy clothing, shoe and accessory stores, the newest shops in NoLIta, SoHo and the West Village are more concerned with home matters.

A new crop of home furnishings and furniture stores – including mega-retailer Crate & Barrel – have been opening in these neighborhoods.

“SoHo has always had some home furnishings stores on Wooster and Thompson streets,” said Steven Greenberg, president of the Greenberg Group, a retail real estate consultancy. “It’s never been the true focus, but the neighborhood is becoming more diverse.”

The new diversity includes the NoLIta openings of such stores as Saigoniste, a groovy, new Asian-inspired home furnishings store; The Apartment; and Dinosaur Designs, which sells housewares made of resin.

The nesting trend has also moved through SoHo.

Moss, operated by former fashion designer Murray Moss, has been operating on Greene Street for years, alongside another home store, Troy. There’s also Aero on Spring Street and the Broadway Panhandler.

The expansion has also reached the West Village, with the opening of a new home store called Viux Carre.

And then there’s Crate & Barrel. The 28,000-square-foot store is expected to open next week at the corner of Houston and Broadway, diagonally across from a giant Pottery Barn.

“Since we first opened the Madison and 59th Street store, we’d been looking [downtown], and we finally found this space two years ago,” said Gordon Segal, founder and CEO of Crate & Barrel. “We wanted to open this type of store in New York, going after sales in a more aggressive way.”

“Crate & Barrel will make a huge impact,” Greenberg said. “They get it at an affordable price point.”

He added that the big retailer will act as an anchor. “It will attract the attention of other people, and . . . home furnishings people will continue to show up here.”

The chain retailer will likely change the historic flavor of SoHo, Greenberg added. “It won’t be as avant-garde as it was,” he said. “The future will be told when Bloomingdale’s opens” – a reference to the department store’s downtown branch, which is slated to open next year in the Canal Jeans site on Broadway.

The neighborhood architecture is particularly well suited for home furnishings stores, however.

“Along Broadway there are great spaces and you can come up with 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot spaces, with 18- to 20-foot ceilings,” Greenberg said. “If a retailer like Maurice Villency decided to open there, there is the type of real estate to support that.”